Sustainability sounds oh-so-simple, but in reality is more complicated than at first sight:

No-one can prove that a fishery (or anything else) is sustainable. We try to source sustainably, but there may always be something around the corner to catch us out. What we can know for sure is that a fishery isn’t sustainable. So claiming to ‘source from sustainable fisheries’ would be rather questionable. Instead what Pisces-RFR tries to do, and tries always to say (footnotes are difficult in a 10 second sound-bite!), is find ‘more sustainable’ fisheries, for the reasons just stated – it isn’t intended to be a bit of greenwash, leaving the door open to sourcing from unsustainable fisheries!

There may be many sustainable futures: A world without people; a world only with only organic farming; and a world with non-organic farming might all be sustainable, but result in very different futures. For fisheries, one could have one goal, of getting the maximum long term catch of sand eels from the North Sea, to make fish meal and fish oil. But that would come at a cost for all the other species that feed on sand eels, whether these be fish, birds or whales, and also the fishermen who depend upon ‘direct human consumption’ fisheries. You can’t have both – it is a choice.

Third, there are different types of sustainability, within a fishery. You might manage it simply to avoid stock collapse. That largely remains the goal of Europe’s depleted fisheries. But that’s a miserably negative goal. It’s also a pretty risky thing to do, given the limited understanding that we have of fish. Instead, we want stocks to be built up so that they can support bigger catches, and better profits, while still leaving plenty for other species. Not only is this possible, it is actually the goal that global governments have committed themselves to by 2015.